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About this project

This groundbreaking online game combines the head to head league play of traditional fantasy and the thrills of wagering at a Las Vegas sportsbook... for free. At long last, you don't have to pay a dime to get in on the sports betting action!

(Update! Like our Facebook page to get wise-guy wagering tips and up-to-date progress reports on the Kickstarter!)

Why We Made It

1) Fantasy is incredibly fun… but incredibly flawed. A fluke injury can derail your entire season. Bye weeks ruin the action. The very best players end up resting up in the real world during your league playoffs! We wanted to make a sports game that didn’t have an Achilles’ heel. And a blown ACL. And a hip pointer…

2) Gambling is incredibly fun… but incredibly illegal. – When you’ve got money on a game every single second is juiced with adrenaline. Only one small problem: betting online will get you in trouble with Johnny Law, Johnny Knuckles, or both. Oh, and you'll go broke. We wanted to make a sports game that won’t destroy your life (we're considerate like that).

3) Sports fans needed a true test of sports knowledge. Every fan thinks they know what’s up - now they can finally prove it. At the end of a LeagueHeads season the champion will truly be a sports genius instead of some jamoke who’s got a lucky horseshoe up his bum.

How Do I Play?

• Then join a league, or create one of your own and invite your friends.

• Your league can have as few as 2 or as many as 16 players.

• Each week, you’ll go head-to-head against a different player.

• You each start the week with a bankroll of 5,000 fantasy LeagueHeads dollars.

• Over the course of the week you review the lines (updated every 30 minutes) and place your bets - spread, moneyline, over/under and even parlays!

• You can place bets right up until kicktoff/tipoff/puck drop. That means you can always build a bigger lead or stage a heroic comeback. You can even sway your bets depending on how many credits you have left. Strategy is key!

• At the end of the regular season, the top 8 teams (if applicable) are seeded for the playoffs for a single-elimination showdown. That's right, your playoffs are the real playoffs, not some week 16 garbage.

• The final two teams compete for LeagueHeads supremacy as they make their wagers on the conference championships and the Super Bowl!

We Need Your Help

So far we've built the initial beta of the site with nothing but our blood, sweat and tears. We’re proud papas, but we’ve now reached a point where we need Kickstarter to raise funds to give you the ultimate sports league gaming experience. When we successfully raise the funds we will be able to bring you:

• Mobile apps for iOS and Android

• All the different sports leagues! NBA, MLB, NHL, Soccer, etc. Not only will you be able to play in these different leagues but you’ll be able to play in a superleague where you compete across all sports all at once!

• Sway Tracker – a fully sortable tracking log of every bet made on LeagueHeads to help inform you exactly what clever bets to make and which ones to steer clear of

• Gamebuzz – a sortable message board community for players to exchange information and the rationale behind their bets

What You Get

We here at LeagueHeads wanted our rewards to show that there’s something that's just as important to us your financial support- your ideas. That’s why we’re opening up the beta to the lower level tiers and giving direct access to the LeagueHeads development team to the top tiers. Additionally, we’ve thrown in a grabbag of fun enhancements to the gameplay experience in the form of individualized badges and profiles so all our Kickstarter supporters will be recognized as the far-sighted geniuses they are instead of bandwagoners. And of course each tier gets what the tiers below it receive (except in the case of being the namesake for divisional trophies).

Team LeagueHeads

Jonathan McAllister, Lead Developer -Jonny Mac is an avid engineer, sports fan, devoted husband and dad. His professional credentials include an electrical engineering degree from USC, and ten years programming experience at companies such as Napster, ClickStar and YP.com. In 2007, he and Director of Product Greg Levy created SportsTrack, an online fantasy Facebook sports book. Five years later, those experiences informed his programming LeagueHeads (in a rails app for you brogrammers.) from scratch in his garage on a self refurbished gen 1 macbook pro while listening to pandora on a 10 year old Sony Vaio connected to a tube amp radio. Jonny is from Boston, Massachusetts, where professional sports come before food and water. He now lives in Monrovia, CA with his wife and 1 year old daughter.

Gregory Levy, Director of Product - Greg is currently the Director of Product for Zed (www.zed.com), focusing on the development of m-commerce storefronts, mobile games and applications. Before that, he was a Product Manager for DIRECTV, managing their NFL and MLB e-commerce offerings. An entrepreneur at heart, he co-founded SportsTrack, Social Thrills Inc, and now LeagueHeads. Greg grew up in Southern California, and remains loyal to his Chargers and Lakers.

Brendan Joyce, Game Designer - Brendan worked for TVG (www.TVG.com), the nation's largest legal online gambling company from 2007-2009. While there he helped redesign their webpage, developed game-based contests for users, and hit some lucrative trifectas. At TVG he developed the idea for LeagueHeads and began scheming up the game dynamics and site layout. Additionally, he love/hates the Chicago Bears and Chicago Bulls and love/pities the Chicago White Sox.

Sergey Borisov, Mobile Developer - Sergey's Doctorate of Philosophy in physical oceanography speaks to the mans level of intelligence. Simply put, there aren't many problems Sergey cannot solve. His work experience includes positions at Parasoft, Music IP, and his current role as software architect at YP.com. He has developed multiple mobile applications for iOS including Gun Wars, and Fifteen, and is currently working to make the mobile version of LeagueHeads the crowning accomplishment of his lifetime. Sergey is Jonny's neighbor, and also lives in Monrovia, CA with his wife Olga.

Ryan Kramer, Lead Database Administrator -Ryan is a grizzled old vet in the sports gambling game, as its in his blood, growing up in the swamps of Jersey. From sports pool management, bookmaking, to sports betting he has done it all. After receiving his Degree in Business Information Technology at Virginia Tech Ryan packed up and shipped out to Los Angeles. Currently he works as a Lead DBA at YP.com where he continues to expand and fine tune his craft. Ryan has resisted the pressure in LA to not care about sports and continues to be a die hard Yankees, Giants, Knicks and Hokie (Virginia Tech for those of you who don't know what a Hokie is) fan.

Risks and challenges

LeagueHeads has been a passion project of the development team for the better part of a decade. As such, we've already tackled 90% of the heavy lifting - back end bet resolution, front end programming, scalable integration and a host of other nitty gritty bits of technological gruntwork.

However, achieving that last 10% is what separates a noble effort from a smash success. That last 10% consists of building the mobile app, developing key features like gametbuzz (an online community where LeagueHeads can discuss the week's bets) and superleagues (leagues that allow you to play across all sports), and smoothing out all the programming and appearance. We won't be satisfied until the site runs smoother and looks better than the current Fantasy websites that we frankly find a bit bush league.

We realize that the challenges we've placed in front of ourselves are daunting. All in, it will take us until spring of next year (March Madness to be specific) to build and launch every feature to complete the game. We've set the bar high in order to create a brand new fantasy sports experience that would hook us - and we're sports fanatic perfectionists.

Throughout the LeagueHeads developmental process we'll provide up to date progress reports on what stage we're on and how close we are to crossing our finish line for each goal. For instance, if we were to receive our funding tomorrow we'd be able to develop the mobile component by mid December.

Our bottom line: our metric to define LeagueHeads' success is how many players are loving their experience. Currently there are over 32 million people in North America that participate in Fantasy Sports every year, yet there is no game remotely like what we have built. Our end goal is to have LeagueHeads become an integral part of how millions of sports fans appreciate their favorite pastimes. And we want to start with you.

Kickstarter is not a store.

Pledge $100 or more
About $100

You’ll get an game Founding Franchise Leagueheads badge for your profile as well as listing in the game credits. Someday you'll be able to hyperlink your grandchildren to www.LeagueHeads.com and proudly boast "See? I built that."

Kickstarter is not a store.

Pledge $1,000 or more
About $1,000

After each season you'll get a detailed statistical breakdown of which bets for you worked and which didn't. You’re guaranteed to become a better (fantasy) gambler*. (*Or at least a more knowledgable one)

Kickstarter is not a store.

Pledge $5,000 or more
About $5,000

You to join the exclusive "LeagueHeads Commissioner's Office" for a two hour long skype session with the LeagueHead development team. Your input will directly influence the final features offered for the game and your sports gaming genius will ripple out through eternity.

Kickstarter is not a store.

Pledge $10,000
About $10,000

You get a one on one two hour skype session with the LeagueHead creative team. The championship trophy for all of LeagueHeads will be named after you. That's right. You'll be the Vince Lombardi of LeagueHeads.